From its impossible title to its tortured plot, The Face of Love sounds like a good candidate for a “Lifetime Movies That Were Never Actually Made” category. A woman sees her late husband’s exact double, starts a romance without telling the new man about the resemblance, and causes woe to all concerned. Because—let’s just note this for the record again—she doesn’t tell him about the resemblance. Tortured.

However. While The Face of Love might well be a failure because of its delayed-revelation contrivance, there is something in this movie that haunts. For one thing, the two actors at the center of its story are well above the level of a cable-TV production and visibly eager for this kind of meaty emotional material.